Recently Added Google Ranking Signal Benefits Etsy Sellers

It’s a good time to be an Etsy seller as far as visibility in Google search is concerned. Earlier this year, Google announced two major pieces of news with regards to how it ranks search results on mobile devices. The one that got the majority of industry coverage was related to the mobile-friendliness of sites. The other was that Google started using app indexing as a ranking signal, and has even expanded that signal since the initial announcement.

Etsy has a very popular mobile app, and Google’s app indexing signal seems to be benefiting its content greatly. In fact, Google specifically named Etsy as a developer that is seeing a boost in traffic from it.

Google held its quarterly earnings conference call last week, and during that, Senior Vice President and Chief Business Officer Omid Kordestani had this to say about the company’s mobile efforts (via Seeking Alpha’s transcript of the call):

More Google searches now take place on mobile devices than on computers in ten countries, including the U.S. and Japan, two of our largest markets. And we know that when people search on their mobile phones, they’re looking for immediacy and action. In fact, 30% of mobile queries are related to location and our efforts around local search are helping consumers to find relevant information fast.

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Our teams have made great strides to help users find what they need within third-party apps through indexing. We now have 50 billion links within apps index and 25% of signed in Google searches on Android now return deep links, taking users right to content within an app or to a link so they can install it. We also recently started showing such links in search results on iOS, developers like Etsy are really seeing a boost in traffic as a result of deep linking. We also added now cards for more than 100 apps like OpenTable and Spotify and we have extended Google Voice actions to third party developers, so we can say things like, okay Google listen to MPR.